I would like to hear more about the skills you are measuring, how you measure them, and the age group of the children in the study. -- Thank you!!

Great question!

Currently, we are studying children aged 4-8 years old. Our preliminary results show that there seems to be significant differences in the ways in which younger children construct their block copies compared to older children. At the same time, there are some young 4-year-olds in our study whose construction patterns look strikingly adult-like, and some older children who struggle. We think that there are very interesting questions we can address regarding how individual differences in this spatial construction task relate to their abilities on other types of tasks. In particular, we hypothesized that spatial skills such as mental rotation or pattern matching may be particularly relevant to the block copying task.

Our study includes several additional measures to assess children’s math abilities, pattern matching abilities, approximate number system, mental rotation abilities, and verbal and non-verbal reasoning and knowledge. Some of the standardized measures we use include the pattern construction subtest of the Differential Ability Scales (DAS), the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test (KBIT), and the Wide Ranging Achievement Test (WRAT).

Great questions!  Our current set up is not yet automated for coding the data that is coming from the video and accelerometers, but we are collecting the necessary data to get us there.  Stay tuned!  One of my engineering colleagues may wish to jump in and elaborate.

With respect to what to do with children who struggle, this is a major part of our ongoing research question.  We know that experience is critical, so the key may be to offer experiences that stem from the child's interests.  In one of our other ongoing studies, we are trying to essentially sneak spatial skills into an activity that does not necessarily feel spatial on the surface to see if it will engage students who might otherwise be intimidated by what they perceive as a task that will be "too hard for me".

In another line of work under the JHU Science of Learning Institute, my colleagues and I are actively exploring ways to bring spatial skills into the elementary curriculum.  That work is aimed at both taking advantage of student skills and embedding activities in curriculum that will help to build those skills.

Just to add a bit more on the ability of computers to  "watch and assess."  Our blocks have accelerometers built in, and they are viewed by a special camera that returns both video and range data. With these three modalities, and based on our past experience with video tracking of objects, we're confident we'll be able to track the blocks and determine their placement automatically. The challenge is whether the system can be made reliable enough to be fully automatic, or if it will still need a human coder to check its work.  As Amy says, stay tuned; we hope to have an answer within the next few months.

The current project is physical block building, but we have plans to test out the relationship between real and virtual block building using a gaming format.  Some of the challenges are exciting to consider--type of interface, how much should we incorporate true physical constraints, are there order effects, etc.  We do collect information about the children's experiences with games and other types of play.  It will be interesting to see similarities and differences with real and virtual activities, especially as a function of age and digital experience.  Do you have thoughts or insights about what we might expect to see?

Virtual building sounds like Minecraft to me.

Yes.  The interesting thing about standard Minecraft is that it partially preserves real physics in some ways but not others. For example, you have to build things on top of other things, but you can remove blocks to leave items hanging in the air.  It's also quirky in that you can't move things around; you can only add or remove (usually by smashing!).  This opens the door for asking a lot of questions about these kinds of features and how they affect and/or interact with a child's (or adult's) cognitive ability.  We see a lot to be learned from the virtual space.

Your question is definitely something with which we have wrestled.  Even in a simple copying task, there is a lot happening.  Children need to be able to parse the model, match parts, consider the orientations of the blocks and the model itself.  We started with the simplest version because we recognized just how complex it would be.  Despite this apparent simplicity, the degree of individual differences we observe is quite remarkable.  There are children for whom this seemingly simple task is quite hard.  Part of our project is to try to understand which spatial skills, as well as other cognitive skills, have the greatest influence on performing this task.

That said, there are manipulations that would allow us to target more specific spatial skills. For example, what would happen if we gave them more blocks than they needed? Determining which blocks are necessary is part of the parsing process that we have constrained. In the current version, they might still have to choose when to use a green square versus a green rectangle, but they currently know that all blocks will be used. Similarly, how much would the individual differences spread out if we did not allow the children (or adults) to rotate the model during the task?  We already have some evidence for a relationship between mental rotation ability and these kinds of building tasks, so one could imagine those relationships being even more dramatic.

We have a whole host of specific manipulations underway or that we hope to try as we keep this project going, but I would also love to hear other people's thoughts on what could be learned through variations on our tasks.

Miriam, yes, we think that by describing in great detail the processes the children engage while building, that we will better be able to understand the underlying cognitive processes that are engaged during this task. In fact, we are conceptualizing the building process as a "path" that the builder traverses as they add blocks, and perhaps backtracks when they remove blocks or fix a mistake. By drawing a path of each builder's trajectory, we can observe places where most builders behave similarly (for example, we have observed that many participants start by building the base of the structure). In addition, we can observe places where certain builders diverge from the most common path, perhaps because they place a block incorrectly, or perhaps they use an unconventional method of putting the blocks together, like building from the top down.  Do you think there are other ways we could conceptualize the processes participants engage in while they build?

Very interesting insight.  In our experience talking with parents and pre-k teachers, there are a lot of children who show very little interest in blocks, but I can definitely imagine that among those who do show an interest, not all continue to engage in these kinds of activities.  Finding ways to foster and maintain an interest in skills that benefit academic performance has been part of our motivation, but I like your suggestion that we also need to be thinking about when it is also important to try to maintain that interest.  I have not mulled over this yet, but I think the key is keeping the interest long enough for learners to achieve 2 goals: (1) To develop the minimum level of competency in some areas that benefit from these skills--I think of this is the need for all learners to be well-rounded and informed consumers of information; and (2) To discover the areas that they do want to pursue more deeply.

One might counter the idea of maintaining interest by saying that not all kids should maintain an interest in STEM, and I would agree with that at the career level.  However, I do think that many young learners lose interest in some areas too early and for the wrong reasons (the way we teach it, lack of relevance to their world, social factors/identity issues) limiting their chance to discover an interest at a higher level.  I have definitely thought about these issues in some of my work, but we could definitely dig deeper and by more thoughtful about it.

 I would love to hear any ideas you have about maintaining interest and what data we might need (from our work but also more broadly) that would help us get there.   Thanks for the provocative question!